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Rethinking Althusser: Ideology, Dialectics, and Critical Social Theory

John Grant Department of Politics

Queen Mary, University of London j.a.grant@qmul.ac.uk

jgrant45@hotmail.com

Presented at the CPSA Annual Conference May 31-June 3 2005

University of Western Ontario,

*Any use or reproduction of this work requires prior consent of the author*

2 Introduction

This paper interrogates work by Louis Althusser within the larger context of an ongoing

study into the efficacy of a dialectical approach to critical social theory. Althussers work

occupies a productive place in twentieth century thought: it rejects the existential humanism of

Sartre, while upholding the type of determinate political positions sometimes abandoned by

poststructuralists such as Foucault or Derrida. My aim is to read Althusser predominantly

against himself in order to rework and relocate his rendering of the dialectic. Althussers

conception of the Marxist dialectic suffers, as I will show, from a number of conceptual

deficiencies. Not only does it seem to reproduce the same type of economism he wanted to

avoid, it overemphasizes the role of structural determinants. By refusing to employ any concept

of the subject the conditions of dialectical analysis are lost, along with the possibility of

accounting for political questions concerning experience and resistance.

I believe that for social theory the real promise of Althussers thought lies in developing a

more rigorous dialectical approach. The following is one way of envisioning the route this might

take. 1) Refusing, unlike Althusser, to overemphasize the homogeneity of any ideological

conjuncture, so that one can begin to identify the contradictory ways in which we are produced

as subjects; 2) Maintaining the category of the subject over against Althussers strict anti-

humanism, which allows one to recognize the movements and rhythms of a subject-object

dialectic; 3) Althussers posthumously published work identifies what he terms aleatory

materialism. It places significant importance on the encounter as a moment of ontological

becoming that is open and multiple. By emphasizing the singularity of every encounter

3 alongside the insights of (1) and (2), a dialectical approach is produced that allows the subject to

identify the contradictory elements of its own, always incomplete, production. Finally, and most

significantly, these elements can then be recast as points of resistance within a larger critical

social theory.

I - Althussers Marxist Dialectic

Althussers project of constructing a so-called scientific Marxism relies on using the

concepts, according to him, that Marx developed as a way of understanding the historical

development of social formations as a process without a subject. Often Althusser explicates his

version of a Marxist dialectic by counterposing it to Hegels conception of dialectics. For

example, the conception of an overdetermined contradiction is played off against simple one,

which is based on the notion of an original unity that can be restored. Overdetermination implies

that at any given moment society is characterized by multiple contradictions that are themselves

the result of a multitude of different constituent elements (or at least more than two). The

distinguishing feature of this complexity is a structure in dominance that assumes the principal

role in organizing and articulating the specific form of any social whole (Althusser, 1969: 200-

02). Althusser calls the structure in dominance the most profound characteristic of the Marxist

dialectic (1969: 206). This dominance is responsible for the uneven and overdetermined

development of the structures that constitute the social whole, which is what delineates a

specifically Marxist contradiction. In any social formation the economy is the dominant structure,

although, famously, it is only dominant in the last instance (Althusser, 1969: 217). This feature

of the dialectic is not only a reality for Althusser, but is required in order to . . . escape the

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arbitrary relativism of observable displacements by giving these displacements the necessity of a

function (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 99). If the economy is only dominant in the last instance,

this means that it is possible for a different structure to be dominant at any other instance, albeit

for economic reasons. Indeed, Althusser goes so far as to claim that, From the first moment to

the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes (1969: 113). This is what invests

overdetermination with such theoretical importance. At any given moment the structures that

make up the social whole constitute a complex unity, which is governed by a specific structure in

dominance. The productivity of overdetermination rests in the notion that the specific shape of a

social formation is constantly developing (in response to the dominant structure), which requires

an infinite return to the specific moment of conjuncture in order to articulate its form.

The apparent tension in Althusser, between an emphasis on rather rigid structures and

each singular social formation that they compose, is not necessarily as great as it might seem.

There is a certain implicit, continual movement, from one position to the other, even if for now

the concern with structures seems to take priority. The explanatory priority of structures cannot

be understood apart from Althussers rejection of humanism and the category of the subject,

which he identifies as a major difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. Althusser

invested great energy in his opposition to Hegelian and existentialist Marxists like Herbert

Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he saw as humanists trapped in a philosophy of the subject

and consciousness (see Althusser, 1976: 99, 188). The following quotation introduces Althussers

notion of ideology, and helps to explain why humanism is an ideological concept.

In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real and an imaginary, lived relation . . . In ideology

5 the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality (1969: 233-34).

The humanist idea of the subject contains what Althusser calls the theoretical characters cast in

this ideological scenario, which include the philosophical Subject (the philosophizing

consciousness), the scientific Subject (the knowing consciousness), and the empirical Subject (the

perceiving consciousness) . . . (1970: 54-5). Althusser is rejecting any notion of a constitutive

subject that acts as the source of its own thoughts and actions. The humanist subject is

ideological because it imagines that it controls its surroundings, that its relationship to its

conditions of existence is shaped, first and foremost, by its ability to make unrestricted and

transparent personal choices. Further, humanist notions of the subject necessarily rely on some

idea of human essence, and therefore origin. To wit, humans have an original essence from which

they are currently estranged or alienated; our foremost considerations, then, must be devoted to

reestablishing conditions that allow this essence to become knowable, and flourish. This is the

basis on which Marxs early work is often judged. Althussers well-known claim is that there is

an epistemological break in Marxs work around 1845 (and in The German Ideology specifically)

that signalled the end of his flirtations with the humanist anthropology of Hegel and Feuerbach.1

Quite simply, when it comes to understanding social relations and change, the individual, or the

category of the subject, is an inadequate unit of analysis (indeed an ideological one) compared

with, say, classes, or the mode and relations of production,. Political and historical change, then,

must be thought as a process without a subject.

In typically provocative fashion, Althusser writes that Marxs theoretical anti-humanism

constitutes a philosophical revolution. It is impossible to know anything about men except on

6 the precondition that the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes (1969:

229).2 This has direct implications for the dialectic. While Althussers concept of

overdetermination contains a specific understanding of complex contradiction between structural

relations, it can no longer be articulated using the concepts of subject and object. Because he

thinks the socio-political field as a series of objects, any claim to knowledge must be posed . . .

in terms which exclude any recourse to the ideological solution contained in the ideological

characters Subject and Object, or to the mutual mirror-recognition structure, in the closed circle of

which they move (1970: 55). Althusser is hostile to any counter-argument that there is always a

mediating term or element that displaces the simple subject-object dichotomy (subjectivity and

labour are two terms that play